He was so stoned he could hardly talk, so I started thinking of him as Torpid. Blond and husky, he told me he'd taken the overnight ferry down to Denmark from Norway, where he works on a farm, and that this was his second time visiting the Copenhagen neighborhood of Christiania, which he loves for the free-flowing hash and live, open-air music. "It's sooooo nice here," said Torpid, taking a pull from an orange Fanta. He'd spent the night smoking and dancing with a buddy, then at some point fell asleep under a bush. Now rumpled, blinking in the late-morning sun, he had no idea where his friend was. He rested his head on a pudgy hand and gently burped.

Christiania is indeed nice, at least most of the time. I'd ridden in from downtown, past cobblestone plazas, over concrete bridges and along asphalt streets. The first thing you notice about the neighborhood is the grass, and I mean the rooted kind. Once you get past "Pusher Street," a two-block-long stretch of cafes and hash dealers, the community is green and lush, almost unruly. Handmade, brightly painted houses rise from groves and meadows. Sunflowers grow every which way in the weeds. Imagine if the Rainbow Family took over Brooklyn's Prospect Park, then add a dollop of Scandinavian whimsy, engineering skills and democracy, and you have a good idea of the place.

On this Monday morning, the community was working through a collective hangover, with trash not yet picked up from the night before and coffee just brewing in the cafe. A few birds chirped and a middle-aged woman, muttering, wove around in her bathrobe. Then, suddenly, a small posse of police officers ran into the courtyard, presumably trying to catch some hash-dealing in action. (Unlike in Holland, the trade is illegal here.) Guns were prominently displayed on their waists. The locals hissed and scowled, or scurried off. Someone switched the cafe's music and cranked up the volume to an anticop rap song by Niggaz With Attitude. So another day started in Christiania.

Settled by squatters on a former military site as a social experiment in the early 1970s, the community is now confronting its dual legacy as a counterculture petri dish and a mainstream tourist destination. However you feel about soft drugs, police raids and relaxed garbage collection, the experiment has largely succeeded. For one thing, Christiania, also called Freetown, still exists. It has about 1,000 residents, many of whom were part of the original group. The Danish government has tried repeatedly over the decades to evict inhabitants or reassume ownership of the buildings, always to no avail (although residents do now pay city taxes and utility fees). Moreover, many of its radical and original ideas have permeated the mainstream. From the beginning, Christiania declared itself car free, and Christianites compulsively separated and recycled their waste, bought locally grown, organic food and other staples in bulk, and derided foreign dependence on oil. But perhaps the community's most enduring legacy has been the bicycle.

And it was the bike, not the hash, that had lured me here.

I wanted a Pedersen. I'd first seen the bike in Copenhagen several years earlier. It was fantastic-looking, like the Eiffel Tower with pedals. I couldn't help staring every time I saw one blur by. I wanted to understand it. How did it work? What happened to the seatpost? How do you get on it? It was both old-fashioned and au courant. I saw distinguished older men on them, as well as young women with blond hair trailing behind in the summer breeze. On the bike, they all looked like royalty.

I learned that most modern-day Pedersens were made in Christiania by an eccentric, reclusive hippie, famous the world over among a small, discerning cadre of bicycle auteurs. I toyed with buying a Pedersen and bringing it home, but a new one starts at a couple of thousand dollars and I had recently brought home another town bike from an earlier trip to Holland. My husband was worried that this would become an expensive habit.

So I flew home, bikeless. But I couldn't stop thinking about the Pedersen. I did some research. I talked to current owners. There are at least two in my town of Boulder, Colorado. A 23-year-old waiter named Ryan Guerrero found one in his grandmother's basement, left there by an uncle who'd lived in Denmark. "I was like, what's this crazy bike?" Guerrero had told me. "It looks uncomfortable, like there's no way it would be worth riding. I got on it, and was like, this is one of the best and most efficient bikes I've ever ridden! Ever! It's now my main bike."

Many of its zealous fans call the Pedersen the most comfortable bike on earth. It was designed in 1893 by Mikael Pedersen, a Danish inventor living in Dursley, England. Pedersen was a clever, bearded lad who pretty much revolutionized the dairy industry with a centrifuge for separating cream. But his true love was bicycles. An avid long-distance rider, Pedersen thought that the conventional bikes of the time, called safeties, were "weakest where they ought to be strongest and heaviest where they ought to be lightest," according to his biography, The Ingenious Mr. Pedersen, by David E. Evans.

But by far Pedersen's biggest complaint was the saddle. What he envisioned instead was a sort of woven sling--virtually a swinging hammock with lots of room fore and aft. In fact, he designed the saddle that would come to personify the Dursley Pedersen bicycle first, then he designed a very strange frame around it. Pedersen greatly admired the diamond and triangular compression trusses of the new steel bridges of the day, which enabled them to be both light and strong. He started fooling around in the dairy machine workshop. He ended up with a frame constructed from 14 narrow rods, joined in 57 places and forming 21 distinct triangles on the bicycle. It was strong enough to support a man of 14 stone, Pedersen boasted. (That's 196 pounds.) Of the saddle he wrote, "It 'gives' in every direction, the weight is always evenly distributed. You may take my word for it that all cyclists--and especially ladies--after once trying this seat will refuse to ride on any other."

The Dursley Pedersen Cycle Company produced at least 8,000 bicycles by 1917. From here, the story gets a little sad in the way Norse epics often do. With World War I raging, factories were turned over to the war machine. After the war, cheaper, lighter bikes could be mass-produced. Both the bicycle and its inventor fell into obscurity. Bankrupt, Pedersen returned to Denmark, where he was spurned by his brother and a series of bitter ex-wives. In 1929 he died and was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave outside of Copenhagen.

Fast-forward 45 years. Jesper Solling, the young son of a prison guard, had left the countryside to squat in former military barracks along the city's lazily flowing Stadsgraven canal. He and some friends started a welding cooperative in an old munitions building. They began building cargo trikes. These soon become insanely popular within Christiania and throughout the city at large, which was in the throes of the '70s oil crisis. Postal couriers started using the three-wheeled bikes, and so did newspaper deliverers, then families with small children. The latter sat happily in the canopied cargo box through rain and snow on Copenhagen's rapidly expanding network of bike lanes. The Christiania bike would become a cultural and design icon. (There are still 35,000 cargo bikes in the city, 10,000 of them Christiania bikes.)

By 1978, Jesper was looking for fresh ideas. He stumbled upon the drawings for the Dursley Pedersen, which was never sold in Denmark. He grabbed some rods and a blowtorch and replicated the bike. He took it for a spin. He was amazed. He was in love. He started hand-building them, thousands of them.

Hooked and in need of an adventure, I began looking for my very own Pedersen in earnest last spring. I couldn't afford a new one, so I started searching the great depot of unwanted junk: the Internet. Denmark has its version of Craigslist, and over the months I was looking, a dozen or so Pedersens popped up. Both Kalle Kalkhoff, the German assembler and distributor of Pedersens, and Dave Ductor, his California counterpart, helped me assess the offerings and figure out my size. One day I saw one my size listed for 3,500 kroner, or $693, about half the price of all the others. It was only a three-speed and it sported a dinged-up pedal. Kalle told me to go for it. Dave warned me the skewed pedal might indicate a larger problem. After some serious e-chatting with the owner, an architect named Thue from Copenhagen who bought the bike used for his now ex-girlfriend, I nervously wired the money. A few weeks later, I flew over the ocean on a cheap ticket to pick it up.

Thue showed up with his two young sons at a restaurant near the train station. Tall and bespectacled, he sheepishly apologized for how beat up the bike was, but we both knew that was why it was so cheap. He said he thought it was about 15 years old. It was a nice navy blue. I rode it around the block. It felt good. We shook hands and said good-bye.

I mounted my skinny navy bike and pedaled into the light Copenhagen evening. It was a strange and not unpleasant experience riding on a sling saddle. Soon it grew downright enchanting. The saddle swayed slightly on tight turns. My weight felt distributed in a new and dynamic way. It coddled me, almost like a nice dry diaper. I realize this is perhaps not an appealing image, but it feels better than it sounds. Occasionally, another Pedersen rider would come from the opposite direction on a narrow street. We would nod to each other knowingly. I practiced my Danish, throw-back-my-hair-and-laugh posture.

Ah, the Danes have so much to teach us about bike love. Americans, for all our freedom-loving inventiveness, have a fairly narrow relationship with bicycles. We tend to think they're for exercise or for screaming thrills. We want them carbon-fibered, built for speed. How silly. Thirty-seven percent of Copenhageners commute to work or school on their bikes every day, on designated bike lanes tripped with traffic signals timed for the bikes. Our most enthusiastic bicycling city, Portland, Oregon, boasts a commuter rate less than one-sixth as high. Townie or commuting bicycles make up only 13.6 percent of the American market. The Danish pedal their machines with supreme confidence and ease. According to various polls, they are among the happiest people on earth, and why not? They ride bikes the way the French eat food: comfortably, in the moment. They ride upright, at leisurely speeds, while digesting their latest smorgasbord and feeling the sunshine on their backs.

After that first ride, I admired my new prize from the top down. That's when I noticed one of the main vertical rods had a slight dent in it. It was a bit, um, bent. I also noticed that the bike did not seem as tall as advertised. In fact, my legs were not as straight as I liked while pedaling.Not at all. I got a sinking feeling. My seductive machine was a piece of crap. I'd been had.

I needed to find Jesper.

I'd heard that Jesper had become somewhat bitter, that he'd hightailed it out of Christiania nearly 20 years ago, decamping for a quieter country life. Somewhere along the line there was a divorce and a business dispute. I'd e-mailed Christiania Cycler, the shop that still assembles and sells Pedersens, but no one would tell me how to reach him. I turned to Lars Engstrom, one of Jesper's original partners in the blacksmith shop. He invented the famous three-wheeled Christiania bike. Some years back, Lars and his wife, Annie Lerche, got tired of the politics, government battles and cooperatives of Christiania, and struck out on their own, now producing their handsome, sturdy bikes on the island of Bornholm.

I met the tall, athletic duo in a Starbucks in Copenhagen. Jesper, they said, had also wearied of Christiania and of not making any profit from his bikes, so he'd moved out and entered into a strained business relationship with the German distributor, Kalle Kalkhoff. For nearly a decade, they had contracted a Czech company to build Pedersen frames. But it was still difficult for both partners to make any money off an eccentric, mostly custom bike. Now, evidently, Jesper was solo again, back in Christiania, back at the smithy.

"So how can I find him?" I asked, almost panting.

"Let's call him on his cell phone," shrugged Annie.

Which is how I ended up at Cafe Nemo with Torpid. After he lumbered off to find his compatriot, I coasted my bike over to the smithy, which is now run by three fairly intimidating women in matching gray coveralls. When I asked for Jesper, one grunted and nodded to the back of the old weapons warehouse. I felt like I was coming into Yoda's grotto to sit at the knee of the reluctant master. The workshop was just as I'd pictured, a tall, window-filled space with old Pedersens mounted on the walls. At 64, Jesper had a wizened, lined face atop a boy's thin, agile body. He wore a soft plaid shirt, jeans and skater sneakers. He offered tea. I told him about how I had bought my bike on the Internet, how it was too short and had a bent tube. He followed me outside for a look. He squatted his lanky limbs beside the frame, scrutinizing it with the eye of a surgeon, then wheeled it inside. He flipped my bike with a practiced arm. He rubbed some spit under the seatpost. He ran a finger over the frame number, a code that told him the bike was made in 1984 and was in all likelihood fabricated in this very room by this very man. He shook his head and clucked. I awaited his pronouncement.

"This bike is shit," he said. He groaned. "Somebody has ruined the frame. They have cut the seat tubes down. To me it looks stolen at some point, because it was treated very roughly." Then he added in his gravelly Norse accent, "But I can fix it."

He had me sit on the bike. He donned his apron, his work goggles. He started humming. He fired up a blowtorch and motioned for me to stand back. While I watched, he welded two new steel tubes onto the frame. Afterward, he explained that the seatpost would not be adjustable, but he'd added 2 inches for me. Perfect.

"What about the bent tube?" I asked.

"It won't break," he said.

"What about these tension stays?" I asked.

"They're not nice but they're okay." That was good enough for me.

Postrepair, we relaxed. I was having visions of riding my treasure all over Copenhagen, then at home, where I would trick it out with an eight-speed internal hub, new brake pads, leather grips and sleek metal fenders from another Danish genius, Soren Sogreni. For now, though, we refilled our teacups and sat around a workbench. I asked Jesper how it was to be back at the scene of his youth.

"Christiania is a place you can love and hate at the same time," he said. "I like the village, the noise, the good atmosphere in the summer. It's hard to explain things like that. On the other hand, we have this dope market that attracts gangs and now there's killing and violence. We saw this as a paradise in 1973. We just started blacksmithing. We started making bicycles. We felt they could change the world. In the history of the bicycle, everything has been done before. So I thought, why not take a look? And I found this mystery Pedersen, made by a Dane, all forgotten. It was brilliant."

Between 1978 and 2002, Jesper made about 6,000 of them in a number of sizes and configurations, including what he considers-his masterpiece, a tandem. Since then, another few thousand frames, mostly one called the Model T, have been made in the Czech Republic. Other people make Pedersens, too, mostly hobbyists in the UK. The biggest markets for the bike are in northern Europe, Great Britain and, increasingly, Japan. The average buyer is a tall, middle-aged man more interested in comfort and style than in speed, men like Torsten Jansen, the Danish cultural attache in Washington, DC.

Jesper looked at home in his old shop. Thirty-one years after he sold his first Pedersen, he still has his sharp eyes and steady hands. He has a new girlfriend. He has a small legion of adoring bike-freak fans. Just as those fans had resurrected Mikael Pedersen--disinterring his remains and re-burying them to much fanfare in Dursley in 1996--they were now helping to rewrite Jesper's journey.

"I never made much money, but I have made my living for many years and I've had a good life," he mused. "A wonderful life. I don't regret anything. I love this bike. I just love it. I should love to open my own production again. I would produce my frames myself just like in the happy days."

I knew Jesper had saved my trip, my bike, my ass. I only hoped that being back in this crucible of the Pedersen might save his.